I was thinking of getting western digital red's for a raid 5 configuration for my current desktop. I am running a raid 5 configuration using my motherboard and no raid card with two Western digital blacks and a 1 tb wd black 2.5 inch hard drive. This is a bad setup for a raid configuration specially when using my motherboard for raid and not a card. I want to get 2 WD red drives that will hold me out to late spring time when I do a new build. I plan on turning my desktop I have now into a NAS. What color Western Digital drives should I go for? Thank-you
Hi there! The RAID configuration you are running now really isn't stable. The WD Blacks are maximum performance hard drives, and you have two desktop and one mobile WD Black in a RAID configuration? It's best if the drives are at least the same in model and detail! The difference between having RAID specific HDDs in a RAID configuration and non-RAID HDDs in RAID is that the second ones may not survive that long and other hardware may be damaged in the process. The WD Reds you are going for are perhaps the best choice. They are designed especially to endure the harsh RAID environment 24/7. Other options you could consider for RAID and NAS are the WD Red Pro – handles more increased workloads; or the WD Re – that's an enterprise hard drive for heavy application workloads, datacenters. For more detail: WD Red Pro: on the official WD website (wdc.com), under Internal Storage, under NAS WD Re: on the official WD website (wdc.com), under Internal Storage, under NAS But for home RAID environment the WD Red is perfect for the aim. Best of luck! CK_WD
Will I have to rebuild that raid once I pop in these new hard drives in and replace my current hardrive drive. Will I have to use the utility to delete my current raid and reset all disk to non raid.
Hi again! Considering the fact that your current RAID configuration is a software one, usually you'd have a couple of options, one of them applying in the case you can hot swap, so that you can simply replace your hard drives one by one and rebuild the RAID. But since your configuration consists of two 3.5" HDDs and one 2.5" (with definitely less capacity than 1TB) HDD, making the difference between them too big, I would suggest the following: 1. Back up your information from the current RAID hard drives, so you won't lose it, on a different physical storage device 2. Delete the current RAID 3. Take out the hard drives and replace them with three (at least, if you want again RAID 5) equal (3 x 3,5" and the same capacity) hard drives; as we discussed, WD Red is perfect for the task 4. Rebuild the RAID and transfer your information back This would be the safest path you can undertake to renew your RAID configuration and don't lose your information. I hope I've helped! Cheers and best of luck! CK_WD
